[beingflo]

I can't comment on the rest of the post but this bit stood out to me:

> Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score).

Just for reference, if an employer ever asks me to perform an IQ test I'm definitely walking away.

[sascha_sl]

Or a personality test, which will likely be based on the MBTI - complete BS.

Just because there's an entire consulting industry behind convincing you that to build the perfect team you must have "complementary personality types", does not mean it's true.

Not like the IT industry has the luxury of choice based on such a lot of the time either.

[TheRealDunkirk]

I don't understand the hate towards MB. It does what any theory should do: predict behavior. And it does it pretty well, actually. I'm 52. I learned about it when I was 16, and my mother filled in some questionnaire in a computer program, and it nailed my internal thought processing to a T. Ever since, I've paid passive attention to it, and people seem to fit the archetypes pretty well, though I find the category division names to be utterly useless. Why do you say it's BS? What's the thinking behind the "anti" side?

[pseudalopex]

It's a recurring debate here.[1] Wikipedia has a summary of the criticisms.[2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288772

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

[sascha_sl]

Aside from the link already posted, MBTI testing provides an interesting slight of hand where it abuses nonspecificity. I can read myself into about 3 of the 16 archeotypes pretty easily, and I bet if you read descriptions of adjacent types you can too. The test has to be like that if it aims to categorize humans into just 16 categories anyway. The results, especially on 16personalities, is more about stroking your ego than anything else.

It's a horoscope for smart people, with slightly more utility.

[TheRealDunkirk]

> It's a horoscope for smart people, with slightly more utility.

Well, I guess there's the issue. You think there's very little value in it. I think there's much more than you do, though I agree it's certainly a subjective measure. I say that any of the 3 archetypes that you might "test out" as would give a potential manager some measure of useful context in predicting how you will respond/react to various situations and people, despite criticism of the accuracy of the system.

[kthejoker2]

I think the main challenge with MBTI questioning is less the results (which openly talk about hhow people are on a spectrum between the 16 personalities) but that companies tend to talk out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to describing their own culture with regards to MBTI-style traits.

You can be data-driven or sentiment-driven, but not both.

You can favor disciplined structure, or you can favor creative chaos, but not both.

You can favor generalists, or specialists, but not both.

You can favor ambition or humility, but not both.

But companies will gladly tell you they have room for diverse personalities, and only after being there a number of weeks, months, or sometimes years, will the untruth of that scenario hit you.

[FpUser]

I've been in development for way too long (still am). Every time I've spoken to a potential client I would only talk about what I do, how I do it and how I can solve client's problem. Also present list of completed projects with the references. Anything beyond I consider as infringement of my private life / BS and flat out refuse to participate.

I might have lost few opportunities because of this but that was my choice.

[sn9]

Because it doesn't have any empirical backing, has poor predictability, poor reliability, poor reproducibility, etc. It's fundamentally not scientific and was made up by a pair of laypeople.

See this article for a summary of the criticisms: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personali...

[Sohcahtoa82]

To be able to have a meaningful personality test, the subjects need strong introspection abilities.

And there are a LOT of people that are awful at introspection.

[delusional]

I can kinda respect a personality test. It doesn't really mean anything, but they do stress that there's no "good" personality. IQ tests are different, because a higher number means better. That leads to superiority complexes.

[smugglerFlynn]

MBTI (or other non-scientific test) stressing that there’s no “good” personality behave just like tobacco companies prior to regulations, trying to whitewash downsides of the product.

People rely on these things to make hiring decisions. I personally know people who hire based on reported personality that closely matches their own. I’ve seen people making biased opinions after being coached on these tests.

“No scientific backing, Makes people rely on confirmation bias” should be plastered all over these things, just the way we label cigarettes with photos of smoking consequences.

[ajuc]

There's a difference between personality test taken because you're curious, and one taken as a filter on the way to get a job. Usually you can guess where the authors of the test are going with the questions and which answers are "a better fit". And then it becomes a test of "how much you want this job" vs "how strongly you feel about being honest".

Also even if people answer honestly the science behind it is very shaky and when applied to real world situations it seems about as useful as astrology.

[gumby]

For IQ tests, a higher number is supposed to mean better. The accuracy of such tests is dubious.

[PokemonNoGo]

I had an interviewer use a test they printed from the internet. I had done that test before and knew all the answers. Came off as a full blown genius! Declined the position though, they didn't offer a genius salary.

[mensetmanusman]

Ahaha, you should have left saying you found a better job after staying in a Holiday Inn last night.

[elric]

Yup. IQ tests, personality tests, psychological profiles, not happening. It's a load of pseudoscientific hogwash which hiring managers use to justify their own biases.

[OJFord]

What bias would they have that would be reliably backed up by them?

('Scandanavians are the best employees' perhaps, based on this thread..! But that aside.)

[elric]

"Another INTP wouldn't fit in the team" is a great excuse for "I don't like this person". "This woman only has an IQ of 103" replaces "I don't want to hire her because she wants babies".

Hiring is hard. People are complicated. Trying to reduce them a couple of letters or a number is hogwash.

[OJFord]

To be clear I agree with 'hogwash', I just think it's such random unreliable nonsense that you couldn't rely on it to 'objectively' (so you might claim) show the same correct outcome as your beliefs. Because it would just be all over the place.

[locuscoeruleus]

A friend absolutely bombed his IQ test (mostly on purposes, because he couldn't be bothered). He was a few standard deviations under the average person. When they asked him how he felt about it he excitedly said he was happy with the result. He later got the job.

[robin_reala]

They’re the norm in Scandinavia, unfortunately.

[cushychicken]

This is one of the ickiest things I've ever read about Scandinavia

[randomNumber7]

Wtf. Would be good for me but i still find it pretty scary...

[JensRantil]

Hm, out of six interviews I've had in Sweden only a single one did that kind of test. Norm might be an overstatement.

[robin_reala]

Maybe it’s centred on bigger companies? But anecdotally with colleagues, and based on my experience, they’re the norm.

[drakonka]

I'm in Scandanavia and luckily have never run into any mention of any personality or IQ test at any interview process or recruiter discussion, both in the context of big and small companies. Never heard any friends bring them up, either. Hopefully if they ever were the norm they're less common now.

[me_me_me]

thats mad, you'd get better idea how 'smart' someone is by having 20min conversation.

I guess thats one of those local idiosyncrasies

[samhw]

Hmm, I don't think that's true. I score incredibly highly on the 'verbal IQ' segment of the test, and anecdotally I seem to give people the impression of intelligence, but in the mathematical segment of the test I score about as highly as a potted plant.

Unless you've ever independently (non-circularly) corroborated your 'idea of how smart someone is', my guess is that it just serves as a proxy for qualities like academic education (which != intelligence), social class, similarity to yourself, &c.

[johanneskanybal]

It's a small market with a few big very successful companies leading the way and then the smaller companies imitating as many of their practices as possible. In Sweden the biggest one of them would be Spotify and Klarna both have had IQ tests as part of standard hiring for some time, not so sure Spotify still do but definitely a few years back and there's a lag before the medium sized companies pick up on the changes.

For the record, hiring is hard, no company seems to have got it right. Think IQ tests probably says more than someone being forced to nervously scribble down bubble sort on blackboard or estimating how many water melons there are in pakistan. None of these obviously says anything compared to working with someone for a week.

edit: People are different, if it was as simple as evaluating a conversation it wouldn't be a very hard problem.

[radu_floricica]

Why? It's a pretty valuable piece of information.

[distracted_boy]

Why is it valuable if you can practice doing those type of tests and then get a good score on the real test? What's the purpose then? I mean if the job is writing code, wouldn't you be interested in finding out if the interviewee can code, instead of checking if the person can figure how a certain geometric form unfolds?

[radu_floricica]

If it can be cheating on, that's the problem of that particular test. IQ itself is still pretty useful for a programmer. Depending on position and career level, possibly more important than current knowledge.

[randomNumber7]

Would be even illegal in germany...

[nordicengineer]

I hope you'll understand I'm not arguing against you. I can totally understand the adversity, and by all means people can easily use it as a bias, but it merely gauges how good at "if X then Y" one is, which in turn reflects on how clear the job at hand should be. It's not about being smart/er than others, it should be just one datapoint in a sea of tens of datapoints in the search for "a good fit". And all you're looking for are red-flags, not as many checked checkboxes. Then again, any tool can be misused. Point taken.

[sascha_sl]

IQ in particular is a measure of very specific trainable skills. Particularly the harder part of IQ tests are extremely prone to cognitive bias by the authors though, where they start measuring neurotypicality rather than problem solving ability.

The problem is that these tests do not sell themselves as "just one data point", and even if they did, you'd have to do so many other things to compensate for the shortcomings of standardized IQ tests, they're really not worth doing in the first place.

IMO the best way to assess fit is to ask someone to handle a hypothetical, or to ask for previous experiences fitting a problem or situation.

[ponow]

Of course get to know the candidate as much as possible before hiring, but if you had to pick your candidate based on a single number, you truly don't think IQ isn't way up there as one of the more usefully discriminating ones?

[samhw]

I don't think anyone can doubt that it's likely to be predictive of success. There are sheafs of papers on that: e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/, though that paper also discusses confounding factors. My bigger worry is that I can't imagine any of our candidates assenting to an IQ test (outside of Scandinavia where it sounds like it's the norm).

[sascha_sl]

Absolutely not.

(And I would refuse to pick a candidate based on one number. No good can come of this.)

[the__prestige]

You used the IQ test as an example of how your needs are fairly basic. Is it possible that your needs are not basic, and you may in fact expect high standards of your employer?

[nordicengineer]

I mentioned the IQ test because those employers couldn't stop talking about fitting in. Without tests, fitting in = we like you, we like you not, where WE can be very different today than tomorrow. Applying for the same position after knowing that the hiring manager was replaced is not unheard of.

I definitely do NOT want tests of ANY kind to be the norm, but if I'm forced to find a "fit", then I try to take myself out of the picture and balance the team instead. I respectfully reject the idea that this is similar to "measuring skulls" (a comment in the thread).

Thanks for pointing that out. Hopefully I made myself clearer now.

[toolz]

Bad data is worse than no data. I would suggest using those data points make ones decisions less reliable.